1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to mobile devices. In particular, the present invention relates to using a single mobile device with a plurality of personas.
2. Background of the Invention
Mobile devices are proliferating across the market. End users are dealing with the complexity of bridging their work life and personal life. These users are dealing with information overload, and are being subject to too many calls, messages, and emails. They have to balance their personal contacts and their business contacts, their personal email and business email, their personal calendar and their business calendar, and different security needs of business applications and consumer applications.
Notably, an increasingly common trend is for users to carry multiple devices for different purposes. A corporation might issue enterprise devices to their employees, for instance, a Blackberry®. For a variety of reasons such as security, personal preference, etc., users may also maintain personal devices to store personal contacts, download music and videos, and execute applications. However, maintaining separate devices is cumbersome. Some users have resorted to using multiple network interfaces, such as Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards, on a single device. This is not an ideal solution as physical actions need to be taken in order to swap the SIM card for different purposes. Also, this solution is not feasible for receiving calls from different types of contacts—only one “phone” is active at one time.
Another solution involves an intermediary such as a network server or other entity that processes incoming phone calls based on a set of rules defined by the user, for instance, Google Voice®. However, these solutions have several problems of their own, the primary one being that there is no integration with the existing mobile network. Complications arise with the use of such services as multiple phone numbers are issued to communicate between a user's mobile device and remote devices on the network. Further, none of the existing solutions makes full use of the IP capabilities of a service provider's network, such as an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). Another solution is an application on the device allowing a user to create and select personas such as user accounts. However, this solution offers no integration with the network itself. Consequently a user has to give out the same telephone number/endpoint address to different parties such as friends, co-workers, and business contacts.
What is needed is a simple and effective way to provide call processing for different contexts for a single user without using multiple devices.